It should have been "Mandrake is dead, long live Mandriva!" rather than "Mandrake is dead, long life to Mandriva!". It's a reference to the phrase "The king is dead, long live the king"
I tried a couple of times to get Windows 1.0 to run on a modern PC but didn't have any luck. It would have been interesting to see how it handled tiled windows (IIRC they were scared of Apple suing them if they used overlapping windows).
If anyone knows anymore about getting it to work or what it was like to use I'd love to hear it...
Re:I wouldn't call it a crapfest, but. . .
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
The amiga was the first cheap machine to have a blitter, which copies rectangular blocks of memory. Thus its sprite performance was amazing and that's what made it such a good game machine.
To clarify this, while many people think of a sprite as something that moves around the screen (which I believe is what you meant), on the Amiga a sprite means something quite specific - here's a definition I found:
Sprites are a method of integrating unrelated bitmaps that appear to be part of the normal bitmap on a screen. A sprite is a hardware construct that employs custom DMA channels to fetch source images and integrated them with the main screen. It is related to what a genlock does when it super-imposes two discrete video sources. They are also somewhat related to a playfield in that both or handled by the same sort of circuitry.
The advantage of sprites, as opposed to using a processor or blitter to manually alter the screen bitmap, is to provide fast and efficient visual priority, movement, and/or collision detection. This means less processor time is used to accomplish certain goals, but it also means writing software is easier for developers and they can produce smaller programs, since the hardware provides certain innate abilities ready to be exploited in a variety of ways.
Sprites tended to be small compared to actual screen size (for home computers of the 1980s, some tens of pixels in each dimension) and optionally partially transparent, allowing them to assume shapes other than rectangles. In machines like the Amiga the sprite height was arbitrary. Generally sprite height and width do not necessarily have to be constrained by anything other than the designer's wishes and available bandwidth. The number of available sprites is also dependent on available bandwidth, register real-estate and engineering goals.
On the Amiga a sprite could be a different resolution to the bitmap it was overlayed onto. A sprite was also used as the mouse pointer on the Amiga's operating system, and after using an Amiga for a while many users belive they see the mouse pointer in Windows flicker - something which I remember noticing but have got so used to now that I can no longer see it.
Oh yeah, you really should have mentioned the copper too - which made all sorts of effects possible...
Also "Europe's a big country"? Come on buddy. It's a continent.
You're quite right, but I'm sure most of us know he meant the EU. Many people also wrongly refer to the USA as America but most of the time we know what they mean.
I'm glad that the EU is doing something about Microsoft's monopilistic practices but I believe noone will choose this version of Windows over a version with a media player. Since IMO an OS producer should be able to do what they want with their software (or at least, it's difficult to prevent them) I beieve the best way to open up the market is to allow PC builders the ability to offer more than one OS on their machines without MS penalising them (as they did to Hitachi over BeOS).
An idea (or data) is a "public good". "The Lighthouse in Economics" is a classic text on this - see here
conventional wisdom from John Stuart Mill to Paul Samuelson had claimed that the lighthouse was the quintessential "public good," which allegedly had to be provided by government due to the inherent free-riding of those who could not be charged for the services being provided.
Woah, be careful there. You're right to point out that there's a difference between operating systems and window managers, but there's also a difference between desktop environments (like the (IMO) bloated KDE and GNOME) and window managers. Desktop environments consist of a seperate window manager (KDE uses KWin, while GNOME may use any NetWM compliant WM (the default is currently Metacity)), file manager and many other parts. It is usually the file manager that uses icons.
Well, I was joking about it being easy to understand. Here's Wikipedia's description of the code:
The technique of using arrows to change control flow is demonstrated in the random number generator program below. The ? instruction sends the instruction pointer in a random cardinal direction.
This post is way too late for anyone to read but I wanted to take issue with your last point:
"There are people on slashdot that think that corporations running their lives is even worse than governments running their lives. The grandparent seems to be one of those."
I would rather run my own life, but if the choice is between corporations and the government I would choose the government. At least the government is accountable to the public very 4 years.
Re:This is all they need to do to maintain dominan
on
IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 1
"Hint: You can't get rid of it totally without killing the system."
Marc Andreessen (from Netscape) once said that Windows was essentailly just a buggy device driver. If the only piece of software you need to run locally is a web browser (because all your software is run remotely) it doesn't matter whether you're running Windows, Linux, OS X or a Sinclair QL.
As a result, Microsoft believe they need to control the browser on Windows.
Microsoft doesn't have to fix their PNG implementation to remain competitive. Seeing as IE has a dominant share of all browsers, most web designers will not use PNG files with alpha channels because IE is broken and will render the images badly. Users will only care when they see funny looking web sites and then they will most likely blame the site not the browser...
That said it would be so nice if MS could fix this!
I think the fact that you don't see this used much shows how ignorant many web developers/designers are these days. How many times have you seen a "Show printable version of this page" javascript popup? Shudder...
"Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist, that's true. They are not convicted monopolists."
What's the correct word to use in place of "convicted" in that sentence? Saying "Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist" is a bit long in the tooth...
Yeah, but unfortunately it looks like the EU is going to copy Software Patents.
Maybe I'm being cynical but it looks like the US legislature has been bought by the corporations, and the rest of the western world feels it has to imitate the US to remain competitive... It's a race to the bottom and we're the losers.
I seem to remember reading somewhere (can't find it anymore) that Linus had wanted an Amiga as a kid but ended up with a PC instead. I wonder where we'd be now if that had happened...
Exactly. Linux has been ported to many many platforms. I'm just waiting for someone to make an ARM based laptop with a battery life of a week that runs Linux and e17. A lot of us geeks like Macs because Apple has a nice hardware architecture, an open Unix style kernel and a nice GUI. Unfortunately too much of what they do is proprietary. I see no reason why what I've suggested above shouldn't beat a Mac on most fronts.
Linux has always been designed for the x86 platform first and then ported to other platforms later. That said, PowerPC has a much nicer architecture than x86 (heck, almost anything is better than x86 - the only thing in the x86's favour is that commodity PCs use it). Also, if you're looking at running Linux on a laptop, PPC based machines tend to have a better battery life for their level of performance...
"Unlike with a unix window manager, the border and titlebar are part of the graphic context of the client."
See XMMS as an example of an X Window System app that handles it's titlebar itself. The app just needs to hint to the WM that it doesn't want a titlebar...
I'm the author of an open source project, and I've had a few contributions of less than stellar quality that I've had to turn down. By explaining nicely to them why I didn't like their patches I've seen the quality of one of these coders work improve to the stage where he is now my most among my most valued contributors.
No matter how bad someones code is, the fact that they were willing to contribute their time and effort is a major plus in my book. Often they just lack experience...
Slashdot Mirror
It should have been "Mandrake is dead, long live Mandriva!" rather than "Mandrake is dead, long life to Mandriva!". It's a reference to the phrase "The king is dead, long live the king"
I tried a couple of times to get Windows 1.0 to run on a modern PC but didn't have any luck. It would have been interesting to see how it handled tiled windows (IIRC they were scared of Apple suing them if they used overlapping windows).
If anyone knows anymore about getting it to work or what it was like to use I'd love to hear it...
The amiga was the first cheap machine to have a blitter, which copies rectangular blocks of memory. Thus its sprite performance was amazing and that's what made it such a good game machine.
To clarify this, while many people think of a sprite as something that moves around the screen (which I believe is what you meant), on the Amiga a sprite means something quite specific - here's a definition I found:
Sprites are a method of integrating unrelated bitmaps that appear to be part of the normal bitmap on a screen. A sprite is a hardware construct that employs custom DMA channels to fetch source images and integrated them with the main screen. It is related to what a genlock does when it super-imposes two discrete video sources. They are also somewhat related to a playfield in that both or handled by the same sort of circuitry.
The advantage of sprites, as opposed to using a processor or blitter to manually alter the screen bitmap, is to provide fast and efficient visual priority, movement, and/or collision detection. This means less processor time is used to accomplish certain goals, but it also means writing software is easier for developers and they can produce smaller programs, since the hardware provides certain innate abilities ready to be exploited in a variety of ways.
Sprites tended to be small compared to actual screen size (for home computers of the 1980s, some tens of pixels in each dimension) and optionally partially transparent, allowing them to assume shapes other than rectangles. In machines like the Amiga the sprite height was arbitrary. Generally sprite height and width do not necessarily have to be constrained by anything other than the designer's wishes and available bandwidth. The number of available sprites is also dependent on available bandwidth, register real-estate and engineering goals.
On the Amiga a sprite could be a different resolution to the bitmap it was overlayed onto. A sprite was also used as the mouse pointer on the Amiga's operating system, and after using an Amiga for a while many users belive they see the mouse pointer in Windows flicker - something which I remember noticing but have got so used to now that I can no longer see it.
Oh yeah, you really should have mentioned the copper too - which made all sorts of effects possible...
Also "Europe's a big country"? Come on buddy. It's a continent.
You're quite right, but I'm sure most of us know he meant the EU. Many people also wrongly refer to the USA as America but most of the time we know what they mean.
I'm glad that the EU is doing something about Microsoft's monopilistic practices but I believe noone will choose this version of Windows over a version with a media player. Since IMO an OS producer should be able to do what they want with their software (or at least, it's difficult to prevent them) I beieve the best way to open up the market is to allow PC builders the ability to offer more than one OS on their machines without MS penalising them (as they did to Hitachi over BeOS).
An idea (or data) is a "public good". "The Lighthouse in Economics" is a classic text on this - see here
conventional wisdom from John Stuart Mill to Paul Samuelson had claimed that the lighthouse was the quintessential "public good," which allegedly had to be provided by government due to the inherent free-riding of those who could not be charged for the services being provided.
I remember a mate of mine used to take his Amiga 600 with him everywhere in a rucksack. Pretty cool little machine that...
Woah, be careful there. You're right to point out that there's a difference between operating systems and window managers, but there's also a difference between desktop environments (like the (IMO) bloated KDE and GNOME) and window managers. Desktop environments consist of a seperate window manager (KDE uses KWin, while GNOME may use any NetWM compliant WM (the default is currently Metacity)), file manager and many other parts. It is usually the file manager that uses icons.
That explanation took longer than I thought...
Well, I was joking about it being easy to understand. Here's Wikipedia's description of the code:
The technique of using arrows to change control flow is demonstrated in the random number generator program below. The ? instruction sends the instruction pointer in a random cardinal direction.
This post is way too late for anyone to read but I wanted to take issue with your last point:
"There are people on slashdot that think that corporations running their lives is even worse than governments running their lives. The grandparent seems to be one of those."
I would rather run my own life, but if the choice is between corporations and the government I would choose the government. At least the government is accountable to the public very 4 years.
Have a look at the Mozilla ActiveX Control:
Marc Andreessen (from Netscape) once said that Windows was essentailly just a buggy device driver. If the only piece of software you need to run locally is a web browser (because all your software is run remotely) it doesn't matter whether you're running Windows, Linux, OS X or a Sinclair QL.
As a result, Microsoft believe they need to control the browser on Windows.
Ooh yes, that would be nice. Think about all those sites that still use frames because position:fixed doesn't work...
Microsoft doesn't have to fix their PNG implementation to remain competitive. Seeing as IE has a dominant share of all browsers, most web designers will not use PNG files with alpha channels because IE is broken and will render the images badly. Users will only care when they see funny looking web sites and then they will most likely blame the site not the browser...
That said it would be so nice if MS could fix this!
I think the fact that you don't see this used much shows how ignorant many web developers/designers are these days. How many times have you seen a "Show printable version of this page" javascript popup? Shudder...
"Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist, that's true. They are not convicted monopolists."
What's the correct word to use in place of "convicted" in that sentence? Saying "Microsoft has been found by a court of law to be an abusive monopolist" is a bit long in the tooth...
Yeah, but unfortunately it looks like the EU is going to copy Software Patents.
Maybe I'm being cynical but it looks like the US legislature has been bought by the corporations, and the rest of the western world feels it has to imitate the US to remain competitive... It's a race to the bottom and we're the losers.
I seem to remember reading somewhere (can't find it anymore) that Linus had wanted an Amiga as a kid but ended up with a PC instead. I wonder where we'd be now if that had happened...
Exactly. Linux has been ported to many many platforms. I'm just waiting for someone to make an ARM based laptop with a battery life of a week that runs Linux and e17. A lot of us geeks like Macs because Apple has a nice hardware architecture, an open Unix style kernel and a nice GUI. Unfortunately too much of what they do is proprietary. I see no reason why what I've suggested above shouldn't beat a Mac on most fronts.
Linux has always been designed for the x86 platform first and then ported to other platforms later. That said, PowerPC has a much nicer architecture than x86 (heck, almost anything is better than x86 - the only thing in the x86's favour is that commodity PCs use it). Also, if you're looking at running Linux on a laptop, PPC based machines tend to have a better battery life for their level of performance...
"My favorite all-time development tool is Pascal as implemented by Borland in 1985."
;)
Ahh yes, Borland Pascal by Anders Hejlsberg. Whatever happened to that guy?
"Unlike with a unix window manager, the border and titlebar are part of the graphic context of the client."
See XMMS as an example of an X Window System app that handles it's titlebar itself. The app just needs to hint to the WM that it doesn't want a titlebar...
I'd love to do this sort of thing in the future. Could I ask what sort of software it is?
I'm the author of an open source project, and I've had a few contributions of less than stellar quality that I've had to turn down. By explaining nicely to them why I didn't like their patches I've seen the quality of one of these coders work improve to the stage where he is now my most among my most valued contributors.
No matter how bad someones code is, the fact that they were willing to contribute their time and effort is a major plus in my book. Often they just lack experience...